sheepofblue

Learn Objective-C on the Mac by Mark Dalrymple and Scott Knaster Apress ISBN 978-1-4302-1815-9 $39.99 (Amazon.com $25.19)

This book is a intro to Objective-C but not an intro to programming book (a moderate level of programming is needed) there is also some Cocoa and XCode stuff in it.

A bit of history before I begin Scott Knaster has been writing about Macs for a long time and I can remember reading stuff from him as far back as System 7 . Been around a while

The book starts out explaining the differences between Objective-C and regular old C. From there it progresses on to a very light discussion about Object Oriented programming.

After the first 5 chapters it then progresses to my only gripe. The middle of the book goes into XCode and the Foundation Kit. These are way out of place in my opinion belonging at the end or even left out. They are not poorly written just way out of context.

After the diversion they then go into some memory management topics and into object initialization.

The next three chapters should have been after the memory management or maybe even after Chapter 5 instead of the XCode stuff. They cover Properties, Categories and Protocols (nice features of Objective C). After these I would have put the Key-Value coding chapter with Appkit and File Loading taking up the end.

Not sure where I would have put the NSPredicate chapter. An interesting topic but not Objective C criticial. I would have maybe even left it out.

So overall the book is well written, though I disagree with the flow. I would have deleted some chapters and maybe added some detail to others.

All the complaints aside I give this four hooves up. Most definitely worth the cash.

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